


back when I had time to dream

by Anonymous



Series: boys of the raven variety (my TRC fics) [4]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/M, Gen, Joseph Kavinsky is His Own Warning, M/M, Stalking, let's be real that's what this is, the character death is kavinsky and it happens the same way as canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:01:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25756285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Blue Sargent is a very sensible person. Joseph Kavinsky isn't.Too bad he seems interested anyway.
Relationships: Joseph Kavinsky/Blue Sargent, but he hits on her y'now typical kavinsky stuff, nobody kisses or anything
Series: boys of the raven variety (my TRC fics) [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1827523
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14
Collections: anonymous





	back when I had time to dream

It begins the way it ends, with a white Mitsubishi brilliantly on fire. A not-insignificant portion of the middle is that way too.

* * *

  
She hears the crunch like a sickly, drawn-out thunderclap, watches the shadows dance beneath the window as the collapsing street-light falls to the street in a spray of sparks.

  
Blue Sargent is not surprised, because the prologue is full of it too, cocaine-white cars on fire in the shadow of the blue-green mountains and blue-black night-sky.

  
If anything, she’s mostly irritated, because the completion of her math homework isn’t exactly aided by Joseph Kavinsky crashing into a parked car, a street-light, three trash cans and a very unfortunate raccoon just outside her window.

  
Already though, Maura is calling her name from the doorway, frantic and concerned, a good Samaritan of the neighborhood. Blue makes her way downstairs and is frantically shook a bit around the shoulders by her mother, who despises physical altercations but nonetheless has an unintentionally tight, restless sort of grip when she’s this worked up.

  
“Blue, would you go over there, _oh lord, there’s a body_ -” Blue looks out the doorway.

  
 _Huh_ , she thinks, _so there is_. A body, Kavinsky presumably, is sprawled across the pavement, looking almost _obscene_ in it’s implications—like the sacrilegious, inelegant picture of death found in road-kill. The car smokes behind him, obscuring the distant mountain-ridge into a cloud of black-gray.

  
“I need to call the police.” Maura says. “Blue, can go see- god, are they alive? Blue, Blue please.” Maura is rambling. Jimi presses the landline into Maura’s hand. _You could have just called yourself_ , Blue thinks, but her family works in mysterious, codependent ways, like differing limbs of a larger organism.

  
As she’s pushed in the direction of the wreck and the voice of an exhausted 911 operator crackles through the phone, she protests weakly-- “Mom, it’s Joseph Kavinsky, that’s his car.”

  
“Who?” Maura whispers in Blue’s direction, before continuing to hurriedly answer questions regarding the accident. Then she shakes her head in a motion not entirely unlike a wet dog, dismissing the question. “Whatever, Blue, go see if they’re breathing, go!”

  
And this is how Blue ends up spending a good portion of her evening crouched beside the unconscious body of her town’s most prominent drug dealer, using her hand to bat away smoke from her face and cursing Aglionby students for being assholes even when they aren’t awake.

  
The strangest thing, though, is not the crash itself, which is just about a weekly occurrence with this particular boy, or even the fact that it’s in front of 300 Fox Way, because she knows he deals to some teenagers in the neighborhood, or even the fact that Joseph Kavinsky somehow makes looking like a corpse a not entirely bad thing.

  
It’s him waking up that sticks in her brain long after the paramedics have attempted to help a very familiar and very resistant patient, after the ambulance has rolled away lacking it’s intended cargo.

  
The grin is what gives it away. Somehow in the chaos of the crash those stupid white sunglasses had managed to stay on his face, so he’d probably been awake for a few moments already when a satisfied, lecherous grin had crawled across his face and gripped a wrist she hadn’t even realized was near his sooty hand.

  
“Holy shit.” He breathes out. His accent is a little jarring, probably because she is so used to either the snotty New England clipped voices or Old Virginian tones of most Aglionby boys at Nino’s or the soft, blended sort of drawl of locals. Her back is sweating, hot enough to blister. Kavinsky’s eyes are covered but his chin is tilted upwards in a way that indicates something very interesting going on just beyond her. With a sickening feeling of a dread in her gut, she realizes-- the crash is in front of me, the flames are in front of me.

  
Slowly, uneasily, she turns around; staring at her is the largest coyote she’s ever seen, the sort that she would assume to be a wolf if she knew they didn’t live outside protected areas in Virginia anymore. The strangest thing, though, is the fact that the creature is the color of an explosion, bright orange with highlights of sooty black and scorching red. Instead of eyes, blue flame licks outwards from two crevices in its skull.

  
Her breath catches in her throat, fear spreading nauseating and sharp under her skin.

  
The creature snaps its jaws with a spray of sparks, but by the time Blue has enough feeling in her limbs to scramble back, it’s disappeared, running faster than any animal she’s ever seen down the steep descent of the wayside. All that’s left is a trail of smoke.

  
Kavinsky looks towards her in a way that would be funny if she wasn’t still balanced upon the knife’s edge between terror and amazement.

  
“Damn bitch.” He says, voice breathy like he’d just run a marathon. “You ever mess with weird dreams? Shit folks wouldn’t believe?”

  
“What?” She asks, the bright, sharp lines of the creature still burning in her retinas. Down the street, a siren wails. She shakes her head, frowns. “Your ride is here, Raven Boy.”  
She doesn’t run back to the house, but it’s a near thing. The crowd that has gathered is large, the women of her home mingling with irritated and concerned neighbors, but it’s clear that the flame-coyote had been a wildlife sighting only meant for two.

* * *

She has a few run-ins after that. It feels an awful lot like he’s looking for her, and if that weren't patently absurd she’d accuse Kavinsky of stalking.

  
“I don’t do drugs.” She cuts out as she exits Mountain Valley High and unlocks her bike, covering the combo with her hand just to be safe.

  
“I contain multitudes, babe. How about an ID? On the house.” She glances towards where’s loitering in a white Mitsubishi (in off-the-lot condition, weirdly enough), windows rolled down to call towards her.

Later she’d figure she probably should have kept quiet, but she had been an amateur then, so she responds-- “I don’t trust you.”

Kavinsky laughs, high and sharp like a jackal. He flicks stray embers of what’s probably a joint onto the pavement. “Baby, baby, who ever said anything about trust?”

  
Blue’s mouth and throat are dry as a birdbath in July. Making a conscious effort to avoid returning his gaze, she rides away. He follows her for a bit, crawling ten or so yards behind her until she turns onto a nature-trail that’s only wide enough for foot and bike traffic. She circles that trail for hours until fingers of pink and orange spread across the lowering sky, pulse beating fast in her neck and wrist like a hummingbird.

* * *

The next time is about a week later, when she’s on-shift at Nino’s. She’d love to believe it’s a coincidence.

  
He strolls in, snatches a menu off the podium and slides into an unoccupied booth with complete disregard for the queue of waiting customers. Blue watches, mouth agape.

  
Kavinsky beckons her over with a little flick of his wrist in the air, and after a moment of shock, she storms over, steps pointed and angry against the linoleum floor.

  
“Hey, hotstuff.” he greets. “Tell me, how big was the explosion?” He makes a sort of spreading motion with his hands in a crude imitation of a mushroom cloud. Blue purses her lips.

  
“Just smoke. And a dead raccoon. Thanks for messing with the wildlife, asshole.”

  
“Aw,” he croons, “you a tree-hugger? That’s real cute.”

  
Blue rolls her eyes. “Wear a seat-belt next time. And get out of that booth, there’s customers waiting.”

  
He lowers his sunglasses enough to give her a heated, challenging look. “Make me.”

  
Blue gets the manager, who does just that.

* * *

The third time she sees the knife-emblazoned Mitsubishi in the horizon, driver’s side open with an all-too-familiar figure stepping out, she gets on her bike and absconds as quickly as she can without appearing scared. In the reflection of her handle-bar mirror, his thin form gets smaller and smaller as he just stands and watches.

* * *

Sometimes, she could swear she sees that burning coyote, just outside her window or at the edge of the street. She blinks, though, and it’s always gone.

* * *

The fourth time Blue sees Kavinsky he clearly isn’t there for her, at least not entirely, and she wonders if she’s a bad person for being relieved that Kavinsky had entered Nino’s to harass Ronan and not her. No, she decides. Ronan probably had it coming.

Kavinsky blows a puff of smoke and cranes his head towards the sky like he’s looking for God. Ronan is beginning to think that God might be just about as dead as his father, that the day Joseph Kavinsky in all his horror and hollowness was born he had just shriveled up like an unwatered plant and disappeared.

  
Kavinsky raises an eyebrow at Ronan. “You tried sleeping with her yet?” he asks, lips moving in the most vulgar possible route towards the words.

  
Ronan would frown, if this weren’t Kavinsky, if he could afford anything but cruel disgust or cruel amusement or cruel nothing-at-all.

  
“The fuck are you talking about?” Ronan spits. He adjusts the BMW’s side-mirror, notices that the skin on his wrist is angry red under the bands. A sharp, close-lipped smile curves on his lips like a hook. Kavinsky hadn’t gotten them completely right after all. Faux leather- it always irritates Ronan’s skin.

  
The other boy rolls his wrist and palm towards Ronan, a sort of ‘hey, come on now’ gesture that makes him feel like a caged predator. Ronan locks his jaw, teeth clicking audibly.

  
“Y’now, the hot townie Dick and his dogs, and I mean you Lynch, have been dragging around? Sargent, or something.” Kavinsky clarifies.

  
The idea of Blue and him operating anywhere near the vicinity of sex is so far from reality that it feels as if Kavinsky had just spoken to him in a foreign language. Ronan figures that if K is trying to rile him up, he’s going to need some bombs that land within the general range of their target.

  
“Yeah,” he responds, biting. “We’re married with a mortgage.”

  
The Bulgarian just laughs and lights another cigarette, flicking a few sparks towards the open window of the BMW.

  
“Not that kind of sleep, Lynch!” he caws, high and triumphant. “That was a test, by the way. You failed.” He adds, peering down at him with his head tilted so that Ronan can see the reflection of the relentless Virginia sun flickering across his dark eyes. “I always knew you were a fag.” This is accompanied by a slow, lascivious grin.

 _I’m done with this_ , Ronan thinks. “Fuck off.” He says, and presses the accelerator to the floor, expecting the Mitsubishi to give chase.

  
But it’s only him, churning up dust and gravel under the tires. Kavinsky sits still and smug in the quickly shrinking foreground. In the mirror, Ronan can see his pale hand give a sharp, sarcastic wave. His teeth ache for the leather bracelets, but his hands are on the wheel and faux leather tears easily like nothing at all, so he just bites down hard into the skin of his cheek until he tastes blood.

* * *

Ronan, Blue, Gansey and Matthew watch the ivory feathers of the night-horror disappear into the night. The sound of ambulance sirens screams in the distance, and Blue is struck by a sense of deja-vu.

  
“You guys managed to get both of those out of your dreams?” She asks. “They were massive, I thought I was having a stroke or something for a moment.”

  
Ronan won’t meet their eyes. His hands are stuffed in his front pockets, and it’s an oddly nervous, boyish look. “Parrish helped. He made shit happen.” He offers, which really isn’t much of an explanation at all in Blue’s opinion.

  
Then, watching the remains of the final Mitsubishi send smoke signals into the sky, everything about her interactions with the late thief clicks into place. “You know,” she muses. “I probably could have helped you with that.”

* * *

(She finds the coyote about a week later, curled up in the underbrush of the road wayside. She tells herself she hadn’t been looking, but she doesn’t exactly hang out in thorny, forested slopes for fun.

  
It looks like a massive ember, fur faded to black with lines of softly glowing orange. It is, of course, fast asleep.

  
She can’t bring herself to kill it, so she just goes back to Fox Way for a shovel and buries it alive in a mound of dirt. It wouldn’t do to have it become a tourist attraction, she figures sadly.

  
She goes to sleep feeling so much older, so much heavier than she had woke up. It’s like a hot coal, hurting to carry but too dangerous to leave to burn.

  
 _Maybe that’s what growing up is_ , she thinks. _Hands becoming callused to bear the things you have grown to hold._ )


End file.
